Most of the time when you are painting interior walls, you want to cut in around the edges with your brush and then immediately roll the open part of the wall so that the brushed part and the rolled part all dry together. In other words, you try to keep a "wet edge" between the cut-in and the rolled areas. Depending on the humidity, you can sometimes cut in an entire room before starting to use the roller, but most of the time you must cut in and then roll one wall at a time.

First of all, hat-banding can be caused by a number of things. The most obvious and easily preventable is to make sure you cut in the edges and roll the walls with paint that came out of the same bucket. This may sound obvious but in the rush to get things done often painters will open up 2 cans of paint, with one being use to cut in and the other for rolling. You can get away with this most of the time but eventually it will bite you.

Once you have properly prepared your deck (see the procedure under the Tip of the Week archives) you are ready to apply your Stain of Choice. There are several options available depending on the look or durability that is important to you:

A bathroom can provide a difficult environment for paint to perform as well as we would like for it to. A half bath without a shower or tub can be treated pretty much like any other room. Most of the time you would want to use a paint other than a flat just so that you have more washability. This could be as shiny as a gloss or as dull as an eggshell. This would depend more on personal preference than environmental demands. However, a shower and its accompanying steam and splashing create a much harsher environment for a coating to contend with.

The thought of picking out colors for a room seems to make the hair stand up on the back of most people's neck. It doesn't have to be a scary experience, however. The following are just suggestions, not rules by any means. There are many situations that call for going against these suggestions. These are meant merely as starting points for someone inexperienced at picking colors.